JUDGMENT

KRISHNA IYER, J.— This appeal is symptomatic of a social pathology which afflicts the justice system at every level with none concerned to cure it.

2. The extraordinary scarcity of accommodation in our country has produced the litigative and legislative phenomena of tenants protection laws and interminable eviction cases. The situation cries for a social audit of the explosive expansion of ruinous and pathetic rent control litigation and an urgent yet dynamic policy of promoting house construction for the lower brackets of Indian humanity.

3. A landlady let out her premises to another lady several years ago (1968) for a term and, thereafter, from time to time, continued the possession of the tenant on fresh lease and increase in rent. Every time there was homage to the law by grant of sanction by the Rent Controller under Section 21 of the Delhi Rent Control Act, 1958 (the Act, for short), as if the letting were of a residential accommodation. It is apparent that all these years an elitist residential school is being run in the premises and that is the purpose expressly recited in all but the last lease deed of December 1975. This lease recites blandly that the lessee requires a suitable accommodation for residential purposes. The period of the lease having expired the landlady applied for summary eviction by application for execution - a novel procedure enjoyed by the landlords of this capital city which relieves them of the need even to file a suit for eviction. The tenant, whose expensive and lucrative school was about to be uprooted for want of a habitation, hunted for a legal plea to resist the threat of dispossession. Technicality is the unfailing resource of an Indian litigant and the ingenious defense, among others, was set up that because the application for eviction did not mention that the letting was in writing it was fatally flawsome. Better pleas which merited serious consideration were overruled but this little infirmity in the pleading loomed large in the eyes of the Rent Controller who, for that reason alone, rejected the relief.

4. The inevitable appeal to the Tribunal followed. An application for amendment of the pleading, by way of abundant caution, to make good the verbal deficiency was also made. Furious forensic battles raged and the appellate tribunal as well as the High Court allowed the appeals and the amendments, overruling the further plea of limitation for the application as on the date of the amendment. The worsted tenant has secured leave to appeal and there is an application for revocation of leave.

5. We have been addressed two main arguments plus other points of lesser moment. The first is that the application for execution is defective because in the narration of facts and lease is mentioned but the words "in writing" are not stated. It is further contended that by the time these words were supplied by amendment of the application, the period of limitation (six months) had elapsed and that bar prevented entertainment of the proceedings.

6. Pleadings are not statutes and legalism is not verbalism. Common sense should not be kept in cold storage when pleadings are construed. It is too plain for words that the petition for eviction referred to the lease between the parties which undoubtedly was in writing. The application, read as a whole, did imply that and we are clear that law should not be stultified by courts by sanctifying little omissions as fatal flaws. The application for vacant possession suffered from no verbal lacunae and there was no need to amend at all. Parties win or lose on substantial questions, not technical tortures and courts cannot be abettors.

7. The further arguments on limitation when a vital fact creative of a cause of action is brought in by amendment after expiry of limitation is an important question which need not be considered in the view we have taken on the adequacy of the pleading.

8. The next issue is of importance not merely for this lis but also for the sen